Truther Taxonomy

The Sept 11th Terrorists Attacks as the mother of all conspiracy theories has birthed many a bizarre theory in just 12 short years, knocking JFK and the Moon Landings into touch. In that time we’ve had beam weapons from space, paint-on bombs, Bush-Genius, and holograms all offered up as alternative “explanations”. On this page we classify the various strands of truther beliefs into a taxonomy.
Ask a truther, for example, how explosives were placed into the building and they will usually insist it doens’t matter how. Ask a second time and they will assume you are part of the conspiracy, being paid to ask rude questions. Ask enough times and you might get an answer, but it will be the kind of answer that makes you wonder if it was worth asking. The bombs were painted on. Explosives were placed during the building’s construction. The buildings were wired for demolition during an alleged weekend power-down througout which none of the millions of residents of the Lower Manhatten Area noticed that the WTC’s lights had gone out.

The latest “explanation” doing the truther rounds avoids use of the word “theory”, and is referred to as a “thology”. A “911thology” tag-lined “the third truth of 911”. Written by a Russian wingnut, Dmitiri Khalezov, who claims, among other things, that he is living in Thailand under the protection of the King on whom he has unspecified compromising information, it is presented in the form of an ad-supported PDF of 1,100 pages only a few of which are actually worth reading. As is often the case with work in the conspiracy genre. In the spirit of thologistic rebranding, perhaps we should refer henceforth to truthers as paranoid conspiracy thologists?

What is the thology of 911?

The latest theory can be explained in far less than 1,100 pages. A simple-bullet pointed list will suffice:

The phrase “Ground Zero” refers to the surface area closest to the center of a nuclear explosion.

The site of the 911 attacks was refered to as “Ground Zero”.

Therefore the 911 attacks were conducted with thermonuclear weapons.

Proof by Dictionary.

In this thology pancake collapses are, like pools of melted steel, mere foot soldiers in an army of straw men that the self-styled “911 Truth Movement” put on parade before us. In Khalezov’s book entire battalions of straw men march across every page engaging in mass battles of self-contradiction and face-palmingly sloppy thinking.

That in mind, we shall attempt to classify the key aspects of existing theories/thologies. Over time the intent is to build up a list of quick-links to instant rebuttals of each every Truther lie and make mock of the breathtaking idiocy of their claims.

Controlled Demolition
One of the few things that all in the truther community will agree on: The buildings did not collapse, they were demolished. That much is, to Truthers, obvious and one only has to look at grainy internet videos to see it for oneself (the mountains of evidence against controlled demolition can therefore be ignored). Disagreement exists as to how the buildings were blown up, with some even suggesting that the explosives were detonated in a sequence designed to give the visual impression of a progressive collapse, a twisted logic employed to argue that if it didn’t look like an explosion that is because it was an explosion. The amount of explosives required just to demolish one world trade tower has been reasonably estimated at 1,000 tons, equivalent to fifty dump trucks filled with TNT. Kind of like the movie Die Hard III in reverse.

No-Planer
A point of strong disagreement among truthers. Some believe that no planes were involved in the 911 attacks, and that images of aircraft were superimposed onto TV pictures to provide cover for the controlled demolition. The tens of thousands of people on the streets who witnessed the events are dismissed as either being in on the plot, actors pretending to have seen aircraft, or dupes fooled by holographic images projected onto the sky, an advertiser’s dream technology that has never been seen before or since.

Drone Control
Various forms of remote control flight have been suggested, mainly to eliminate the need for hijackers, the existence of whom undermines any good 911 thology. Dronethology includes un-manned drones to remote police-override of passenger jets. They are largely based on the pilot episode of “Lone Gunman”, aired in early 2001 in which a conspiracy within the US goverment take remote-control of a passanger aircraft and crashes it into the WTC in order to promote weapons sales.

Number of Aircraft
The number of aircraft involved in the attacks has ranged from zero to eleven, with three being the most common among truthers. However, the more questions you ask of them, this quickly reduces t zero.

Dustification
That dust was seen in such quantities can only be taken as proof of government involvement. Where there’s dust there’s crime. Although not all truthers are prepared to accept it was dust that they saw, arguing instead that it was a pyroclastic flow of volcanic ash. If the buildings were demolished because it looked like they were demolished, then it follows that if a cloud looks like volcanic ash then volcanos must have erupted below the twin towers and building seven.

Melted Steel
The only people who claim that the buildings collased because the steel in them melted are truthers. They need to say this in order to back-up their claims about controlled demolition. You remember when you were little and you learned that if you tell one lie you will then have to tell more lies to back-up that first one and you will soon have to tell so many lies that you will contradict yourself and get caught out? Well that happens to truthers all the time. They start off with one statement of bullshit, “It was controlled demolition”, and then more bullshit piles up behind until they are up to their necks in it.

Everybody else saw in the aftermath of the attacks a sevety-foot high pile of rubble – over and above the basement levels, with debris spread out over the surrounding area. Truthers are claiming that that rubble did not exist. The buildings turned to dust, melted, fell into their own footprints scatterting debris for miles around, disappeared down a hole, were dug-up, and shipped to China.

Missiles
A sub-set of the no planers predominantly concerned with attack on the Pentagon. A French troller made this up and wrote a book and website about it in 2002 and became one of the early thological leaders, quickly establishing an income for himself from the wingnut chat-show circuit. Today’s thologies have Dick Cheney stealing a live nuclear missile out of the sunken submarine Kursk from under the noses of Russia’s nuclear security forces and then firing the missile into his own military head-quarters.

Free-Fall
Most truthers have an issue with things falling at free fall speed although they are never too clear on what the issue is. Depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them the time it took the towers to fall proves something other than they collapsed due to impact damage and fire. It might be that they fell faster than freefall, slower than freefall, or at freefall speed and no matter which it proves controlled demolition. Truthers usually rely on carefully-edited clips of widely available internet videos in which they only show that portion of the collapse sequence that meets their time requirements.

Beam-Weapons (terrestrial and/or space-based)
Several different types of beam weapons have been proposed, all of which require advanced space-capable technology. Although some argue that the weapon itself may not have been in space when it was fired. These types of exotic weapons were once a requirement for ‘dustification’ thologies, until Truthers discovered hidden hydrogen bombs beneath the towers that invalidated the need for space-lasers.

Larry Silverstein
For many Larry Silverstein has already confessed to orchestrating the attacks. Truthers say that he made this confession during an interview on television. Silverstein’s insurers appear to have missed the show as they ignored his confession even though they could have bought it up in court to defend themselves against the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit Silverstein had taken out on them. That Silverstein and his insurers both lost billions is irrelevant to those who seek Truth.

Dancing Israelis
A touch of vaudville, but many do believe that those who orchestrated the attacks sang and danced at the scene in celebration.

Incompetent Pilots
Used in support of no-planer and demolition thologies the ability of the pilots is called into question. The evidence of their FAA-approved commercial pilot’s licenses is generally ignored, and anecdotal remarks pre-dating their training is usually used instead.

Footprint
Depending on the weather, truthers will tell you that the Twin Towers fell into thier own footprints and scattered debris over a wide area. Some, such as professional Truther David Griffin, go as far to assert both mutually exclusive claims in a single paragraph.

Nuclear Weapon
The so-called “third truth of 911”, expressed at tedious length in 911thology, is that WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 were all destroyed deliberately by thermonuclear devices buried beneath their foundations in the late sixties. All tall buildings in the USA, they claim, have H-bombs in their basements. Elders of Zion anybody?

Bush Genius
Some people really do believe that George W Bush personally organized the attacks and, presumably, wrote into it that part which had him sitting around on his dumb ass looking like a fool while waiting for somebody to come and tell him what he should do.

Bush, Marvin
His brother Marvin is usually cited as a co-defendent on the completely false grounds that he was “in charge” of WTC security.

Still Alive
The hi-jackers are still alive is a frequent claim made by truthers, but the only evidence of this is a short-lived report on the BBC website that appeared shortly after the names were first released. Normally hostile towards reports in the MSM, truthers will clutch like a drowning many any lifebelt of information, no matter how obviously erroneous, that appears to supprt their claims.

Pancakes
The working hypothesis of the initial report on building failure by NIST was a pancake-collapse induced by failures of the truss joints supporting the floors. Subsequently refined by more thorough analyses towards a progressive collapse induced by fire, structural damage, and loss of fire protection. The results, methodology, data, and chain of custody was widely peer-reviewed and coroborated by scientists worldwide before this conclusion was drawn. Such archaic establishment practices are for some, however, evidence of a conspiracy. To know the Truth about 911 one must first arrive at a conclusion and then cherry-pick anything that appears to support it and vehemently deny that any evidence to the contrary does not exist. This is how 911 Truth has “progressed” from squibs to multiple thermonuclear warheads – and all based on the evidence contained in the same grainy internet videos swipped from the TV news more than a decade before.

A&E
Truthers will frequently, if not incessently, refer people to “A&E” – Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth. A&E are a t-shirt selling enterprise which operates a for-profit website selling t-shirts with the website’s logo on it. Cashing in on the marketing phenomuma of Loose Change, the site allows visitors to “donate” cash by buying packs of DVDs to give away. Like you donate twice – once when you buy the DVD and once when you give it away. Truthers claim credibility for A&E because they have 2,000 members worldwide while ignoring the fact that over two million eligible applicants remain unsubscribed in America alone. They can hardly be described as mainstream, but Truthers will tell you they are the only stream. That they represent all architects and engineers. The words “lunatic fringe” are the approriate ones.

Shill
Anybody who disagrees with a truther. Shills are in on the plot and are paid by the government to spread false rumours. Truthers conservatively estimate the number of people who have knowledge of government involvement in the 911 attacks to be around seven and a quarter billion.

Magic Passports
The passports of some of the hi-jackers could not have survived a ‘plane crash, according to conspiracist orthodoxy, in spite of the fact that identity documents are designed to be durable and are frequently the only means of identifying victims at the scenes of disasters. Here’s a video from the MH17 disaster showing many passports found at the site. We’ve set the link to begin 1m 58s into the video as you probably wouldn’t enjoy watchng the first couple of minutes of footage. According to Sept 11th conspiracy “researchers” those passports must have been planted there, probably by the Mossad.